Trouble Booting

I hope some of you will understand what I am typing about, so here goes:

1) On Saturday, I went home and grabbed my laptop, and turned it on. It gave me a OS Not found message, and I did a CTRL+ALT+DEL, and booted again, normally.

2) I went to make a folder on one of my USB external drives, and <font color=red>BOOM!!!</font color=red> the system crashed.

3) I rebooted and it came up with a message that a file was missing or damaged, <font color=blue>Windows 2000 could not start because the file is missing or corrupt winntsystem32configsystemced. Startup options for Windows 2000 press F8, you can attempt to repair...</font color=blue>

I could not find any file called <font color=blue>systemced</font color=blue> in the path given, on 4 PCs running Windows 2000 fresh. Is that a file from the updates? I found some files with System in their name, in that path, and some are larger than 1.44 MB so I can't put them on floppies to copy them over. Any ideas?

I put the Win 2K CD in and booted from it, and got to the screen where I could say R for repair, but then it told me that my HD is not compatible with Win 2K <img src=/S/confused.gif border=0 alt=confused width=15 height=20>?

It is formatted as NTFS with the same CD I used to install it in the first place. I did install the updates from the Windows Update web site.

4) I pressed F8 and wanted to boot into safe mode, and I could not.

5) Tried to boot into command prompt, and I could not.

6) I made a 4-floppy set of Win 2000 startup disks, using MakeBoot from the Win2000 CD, and I was able to boot into Recovery Console. I ran CHKDSK c: /F with no results.

So, how can I repair what I have on my 60 GB hard drive, without destroying what I have on it?

Re: Trouble Booting

Note The letters "ced" at the end of the error message are not really part of the error message. The previous screen included these letters and was not completely erased when the error message appeared.